Health Benefits of Riding a Bike – Top 10 Benefits of Cycling

Love bike riding? When I was a child, I learned bike riding, but after that, I didn’t try it. They say you never forget if you learn how to bike a ride once. So it’s a time to start it once again and enjoy the health benefits of riding a bike!

It’s fun to ride a bike and get you outside to take a fresh deep breath. Do you know there are how many health benefits of bike riding? Maybe you know some, and you’ll know some from the discussion below.

Bike riding is a low-impact workout which is enjoyable to both young children and adult. It’s estimated that nearly one billion people ride bikes every day for office going, sports and recreation!

So, special thanks go to Baron Karl von Drais, the inventor of the cycling concept in 1817.

Muscle Toning and Strengthening

Bike riding not only tones your muscles but also strengthen it. While riding a bike, you might think that it’s toning calf and thighs only, but it does a lot more than you think. You can ensure overall physical workout of your body. Let’s see which muscles are taking part in the bike riding process:

Gluteus muscles in the buttocks

Gastrocnemius and soleus muscles in the calves

The quadriceps in the thighs

Flexor muscles of the hips

Hamstrings in the back of the thighs

Abdominal muscles to stay upright

Arm and shoulder muscles to grip the handlebars

So, only from the bike riding, you’re getting a good flexibility of the body. From the study, it has been seen that the children improved in their bone and muscle health a lot due to regular bicycle riding.

Hence, how can you ignore the health benefits of bike riding?

Top 10 Health Benefits of Riding a Bike

Builds﻿ B﻿one and﻿ I﻿mproves ﻿B﻿one ﻿J﻿oints

You can find many healthy benefits of riding a bike. Bone building is one of them. According to Dr. Safran-Norton, resistance activities like pedal pushing, pulling on muscles and muscle pull on the bone increase the bone density.

Again, the bike riding can decrease your joint pain. When you’re sitting on the bike, you put weight on the pair of bones in the pelvis and thus helps to reduce the joint pain.

﻿﻿Reduces ﻿C﻿ancer ﻿R﻿isk﻿﻿

If you can continue the bike riding regularly, you can avoid the risk of cancer at a greater rate. Bike riding ensures the proper activity of the cells and keeps them active and functioning.

From the study of Finnish researchers, the person who does a workout at a moderate level for 30 minutes has half chances of developing cancer than who doesn’t. Moreover, they have cited the moderate level exercise like bike riding. Again, from another study, women who bicycle frequently reduces 34% risk of breast cancer.

Therefore, are you getting the health benefits of riding a bike from these studies?

Improves Blood Circulations Process

Moving all of the body limbs is what’s useful for having a healthy blood circulation process of your body, As biking is one of those few sports that allows you to move all of your body limbs together, there is no doubt that it helps in blood circulation like magic. Which in the long run, leads to less physical troubles, diseases, better respiration and yes, better life.

Fight Against Arthritis

If you want to prevent or reduce Arthritis, bike riding works great! Both indoor and outdoor cycling are beneficial for reducing and preventing Arthritis. For controlling the Arthritis, muscle flexing is needed, and you can ensure it by doing bike riding.

Controls Diabetes

You can control Diabetes, only by physical exercise. You need a great body movement or exercise for Diabetes control and this case riding the bike is one of the better options. Due to diabetes, the risk of various diseases like- skin disease, kidney disease, stroke, ocular disease and a lot more increase. Hence, you need to exercise daily.

Let me tell you how it'll work! Due to body exercise, the excess glucose from the cell will be converted to useful energy.

Ensures Stress-free Life

Among the health benefits of bicycle riding, stress management is one of them. It helps to ease stress. From the report of New Economics Foundation study, it’s seen that the bike commuters have lower stress than the car or any other transport commuters.

Any sports help to reduce stress. But most of the time, people don’t get a chance to play sports. So for that, you can be a bike commuter which will ensure your exercise on one side and reduce stress on another side. It also helps in minimizing depression.

Sound Sleep

If you’re in dire need of a sound sleep, bike riding is a good option to consider. Maybe you’ll be lazy to go out for riding the bike every morning, but it’ll ensure your quality sleep.

Stanford University School of Medicine suggests to cycle for 20-30 minutes every day to the sedentary insomnia sufferers. In result, they got that the sleep time has increased by one hour and they get asleep soon. They don’t need to wait for an hour after hour for getting asleep.

Boost Your Brain Power

Need to increase brain power? Want your gray matter to sparkle? From the study of the University of Illinois, the researchers got that 5% increase in cardiorespiratory ﬁtness by bike riding can increase your brain up to 15% in IQ test. Bicycling helps in building new brain cells which are responsible for memory. Usually, these cells start damaging from the age of 30.

Again, it’s a good remedy for the Alzheimer patient. According to Professor Arthur Kramer, due to bike riding, the blood flow and oxygen flow to the brain boost up and regenerate receptors.

Weight Loss

Want to burn your calories and lose your weight up to 10 to 20 pounds? Bike riding is an excellent workout for burning your calories. Regular bicycling can reduce your weight to a great extent and provide you a lean body structure.

Here most of the weight is taken by the saddle, so your skeleton will not get that much hitting.

Improves Cardiovascular Health

Of all the health benefits of riding a bike, you’re definitely going to like this cardiovascular health benefit. Due to bike riding, the heart pumps faster, and it maintains good cardiovascular circulation. Compared to the sedentary people, those who take part in bicycle riding, running and walking show better cardiovascular circulation. So it ensures them healthy and disease free heart.

Final Thought

Though the modern transports like cars, buses or motorbikes make the life faster and quicker, it reduces the lifespan of the people. So why not to promise today to make the bike riding a part of your life to ensure health benefits and friendly environment!

Elscion.com may be a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com.